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Climate Accord Suggests a Global Will, if Not a Way

When President Obama hammered out an agreement with leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa in the waning hours of the U.N.'s climate-change summit in Copenhagen in December, they saved the long-running global-warming negotiation process from total disintegration.

But it may have been just a stay of execution.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) gave all nations until Jan. 31 to sign onto the deal — in part because it was opposed by a handful of small countries — and to publicize the domestic actions they are willing to take to reduce carbon emissions. (See TIME's special report about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.)

Despite some wavering, key developing nations including China and India pledged their support for the deal, known as the Copenhagen Accord, by the deadline, reiterating their domestic plans to curb the growth of carbon emissions by improving energy efficiency. Europe, reliably, came on board with a promise to cut carbon emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. And the U.S. confirmed its Copenhagen pledge to reduce its own emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020.

Taken at face value, the accord pledges demonstrate an international will to act on global warming and energy, even in the absence of a true international treaty. "All the major economies are off and running," says Keya Chatterjee, acting director of the U.S. World Wildlife Fund's climate-change program.

But that's the optimistic view. The reality is that even though governments at Copenhagen agreed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C this century, the carbon-emissions cuts they've promised are not nearly steep enough to achieve that goal. And while tens of billions of dollars have been pledged to help developing nations cut carbon and adapt to climate change, the mechanism for delivering that money isn't clear yet.

It's also looking unlikely that the U.S. Senate will pass carbon-capping legislation anytime soon — Obama lost a key vote for cap and trade when Republican Scott Brown won the late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat in a special election in Massachusetts — and that could potentially invalidate the U.S. Copenhagen pledge and throw the continuing international climate talks into further disarray. "Unless [the U.S.] is serious about its own commitments, there will be a very serious impact on the talks," said Rae Kwon Chung, South Korea's ambassador on climate change. (See the world's most polluted places.)

So the story remains largely the same: the world is waiting on the U.S. Signals from the Administration suggest they may be waiting a while, though, at least when it comes to a hard carbon cap. Although Obama called for comprehensive climate and energy legislation in his recent State of the Union address, there was one term he did not use: carbon cap. And in its proposed budget for fiscal year 2011, released on Monday, the White House did not name a specific dollar figure for revenue it expects from cap and trade. Last year's budget projected $79 billion in revenue from the auction of carbon credits by 2012.

While climate legislation isn't dead by any means — it still has powerful supporters on Capitol Hill, including Republican Senator Lindsey Graham — it faces an uphill battle in an election year.

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